It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats. It means that we might be dangerously overprotecting our children, offering them lives of bland safety and too much counseling while depriving them of the “critical incidents”12 that would help them to grow strong and to develop the most intense friendships. It means that heroic societies, which fear dishonor more than death, or societies that struggle together through war, might produce better human beings than can a world of peace and prosperity in which people’s expectations rise so high that they sue each other for
...more
